by Gavin Gaddis

Hope you’re stocked up on candy (or ready to pounce on the lightly-discounted stuff before they toss it back in the pile for next year). Halloween is almost here. My grand plans include watching a movie and occasionally getting up to answer the door. Might even throw some Pokemon cards in with the candy, who knows what wackiness I’ll get up to? What I DO know is we’ve got some fun news from this week, let’s take a look.

Sounds Profitable, Coleman Insights and Locked On Podcast Network are hosting a webinar on Thursday, November 5 at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT. The session presents new research among 2,000 Americans on how podcasts build connections with listeners. Registration is open now.

The research finds that roughly half of podcast consumers say podcasts keep them company when they don't have people around, and that some hosts feel like friends. Beyond listening, 43% of podcast consumers have taken a podcast-related community action. The presenters will cover what the findings mean for creators, networks, advertisers and brands, including why community matters to sports podcast fans.

Tom Webster shares new findings from The Podcast Landscape 2026, a survey of 5,473 U.S. adults weighted to the Census. Sixty-five percent say a favorite TV show was canceled before its story felt finished. Sounds Profitable then asked those people whether they would watch a new AI-generated season of that show without the original cast or writers. The answer was close to a coin flip. Among those who lost a show, 45% would be at least somewhat likely to watch and 41% would be at least somewhat unlikely, with 14% in the middle. The strongest feelings lean toward rejection, with 29% very unlikely and 19% very likely.

Webster says he anchored the question in a real loss on purpose. Asking people outright about AI content tells you who they would like to be, not what they would do, and he notes that people would have said no to getting into a stranger's car before Uber. Views on AI hosts predicted the answer better than any demographic. Among people who find AI hosts acceptable, 80% would watch, and that falls to 28% among those who find them unacceptable. He cautions that "would watch" is a low bar and does not mean people would like it. The answers also varied widely by show, since 3,590 respondents named 1,888 different canceled shows. Webster and Grant Durando of Right Side Up will dig into that data and AI podcast discovery in a free webinar on November 9.

The U.S. Small Business Administration now classifies creator-led businesses under NAICS 5121, Motion Picture and Video Industries. The SBA calls its October 15 guidance the first federal small-business classification to recognize qualifying content creators. Podcasters are named alongside filmmakers, video producers, streamers, gamers, digital publishers and creative agencies. The SBA says the classification covers 27 million creator-led businesses.

Creators could already qualify for SBA loans and contracting when they met program rules but lacked clear direction on which industry code fit their business. Now, the SBA encourages creators to start with NAICS 5121 and pick the six-digit code that best matches their main activity.

Digiday reports the practical change is easier access to financing, with microloans up to $50,000 and 7(a) loans up to $5 million. Creators Guild of America's Avi Gandhi says the SBA delivers about $45 billion in loans a year through banks, and Visa's 2025 creator report found 88% of creators plan to grow their business next year while 86% use personal funds to do it. Commenters have asked for a specific industry exception for content creators, and the SBA will consider those comments after the public comment period closes November 20.

AdExchanger reports that beehiiv is adding automated audio ad insertion to its programmatic platform, rounding out the podcast offering it launched in April. Publishers can open their inventory to programmatic buyers alongside direct-sold host-read ads, which also lets them monetize back catalog episodes. AdsWizz fills the programmatic inventory and can serve ads into third-party podcast platforms through existing RSS feeds, while publishers keep 50% to 60% of programmatic podcast revenue with no impression or download minimums. The tools are available on all of beehiiv's paid plans and include sponsorship management.

Publishers choose which advertiser categories can bid, and a prioritization waterfall keeps programmatic demand from outranking direct deals. Beehiiv caps ad load at 10 ads per break but does not limit the number of breaks per episode. Targeting starts with contextual and is expanding to behavioral data tied to email logins. More than 2,100 publishers now distribute podcasts to Spotify and Apple Podcasts through beehiiv, growing about 20% a month since launch, within a network of more than 13,000 publishers. Co-founder and CEO Tyler Denk says dynamic ads are meant to attract higher-profile creators, and that some big-name creators have cited their absence as a reason for choosing other platforms. "The most successful content creators today are not single channel, but multichannel," Denk said. He expects video podcast distribution by the end of the year.

Tenderfoot TV premiered Laura of the Woods on YouTube on October 22. The 10-minute short, directed by Kristian Stenslie, is a handmade, "LEGO-inspired" stop-motion adaptation of a firsthand account from Radio Rental, produced with LEGO stop motion animation company Twisted Bricks. The adaptation, built from a 2019 episode with over 3 million downloads, debuted the day before new episodes of the series, which has passed 85 million downloads, dropped for the Halloween season. Creator and Tenderfoot co-founder Payne Lindsey says he loves that something made of toys "can be this unsettling."

Apple Podcasts launched a similar project the same week. The Greatest Stories Never Seen is a series of four animated videos, each about one minute long, built from four different podcasts: Acast's Toni and Ryan, Wondery's Baby, This is Keke Palmer, iHeart's Las Culturistas and the indie House Guest. Apple is promoting the videos on its Apple Podcasts Instagram feed. Ashley Lusk, who worked on the series, wrote on LinkedIn that the hosts were willing to try something new and that the project explores how audio and video work together and separately. Both projects keep the original podcast audio and pair it with new animation, branching out from the tradition of fixed-camera filming podcast hosts.

Podscribe has built a first-of-its-kind integration with ART19, an Amazon company, that tracks baked-in ads in HLS-delivered episodes. Daylight Media is the first publisher to go live with it.

This matters on both sides of the buy:

✅ Advertisers can hold baked-in HLS spots to the same standard as the rest of the plan.

✅ Publishers can exhibit the performance or their HLS-enabled shows, and give buyers a reason to renew.

While they may not be top story material, the articles below from this week are definitely worth your time: